news, views and thoughts

Menu

Tag Archives: Oxygène 3

2 December 2016 marked the 40th anniversary of the release of Jean-Michel Jarre’s album Oxygène. And what does l’homme electronique do to celebrate? Yes, release Oxygène 3, played mainly on the same sort of analogue synthesisers that he used back in 1976, but produced using all the latest kind of equipment for a cleaner kind of sound. I’ve been listening to the new album with just the same kind of smile as back in the early 80s I listened to the first. I was a bit too young to notice the first Oxygène in 1976, but grew into music in time for Les Chants Magnétiques (called Magnetic Fields in English) in 1981, and then worked backwards through Équinoxe (1978) to Oxygène.

It’s the place where Jarre’s kind of electronica rises, out of the ground of 1970s popular music, and begins to flow on its long creative course. At this spring there’s a lot of white noise, swishing and swooshing from left to right; there are squelchy splats of tuned sound, there are incredible atmospheres that you know are made of oscillators and filters but still fill you with wonder; and there are the most gorgeous melodies, all bright and kind of sophisticated, slightly French and very optimistic. And now the new album reproduces the mood of the original, its musical attitude of making transistors sing, its never pretending to be anything but a mesh of synthesised sounds. Basically, if you liked that Oxygène, you’ll love this one. And you will be transported back to the future of 40 years ago.

I can only imagine that the original Oxygène sounded ‘futuristic’, like a foreboding of a kind of future classical, the soundtrack to a life in a palace on some distant planet. That might make it sound like the sci-fi films of the 1970s, with their artificial fabrics and processed foods, telling us more about 1970s imaginations than about the future. But I would rather compare Oxygène with Star Wars, in which a world of faster-than-light spacecraft and heroic robots was set in a galaxy long ago and far away, and the technology served the timeless story of heroic individualism against the forces of evil.

Jarre also made an Oxygène 2 in 1997, on the same analogue instruments that he’d used in 1976, but that album marked the end of a phase of Jarre’s career. Since then he has been making music of a different sort: some up-market techno, some jazz, using the kind of contemporary digital instruments that make the sounds that have become our 21st century normality: extremely clean, subtle, digitised textures, blending seamlessly into acoustic sounds while alive only in computers. It’s a world far from the 1970s future, and that’s one reason we now find ourselves being reminded of how the future once looked. Its like going to see Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens, which is at least half homage to the original trilogy, suffused with a crafted retro feel that will either cheer you up or leave you cold.

So what is it with Oxygène 3 and Star Wars VII? With this massive nostalgia for future past? I wonder if the answer isn’t partly demographic. In the developed world we are seeing the great bulge of the baby boomer generation heading into their 60s, millions and millions of them, still optimistic, still hopeful, now on their pensions and with imaginations stained by the drugs, films and music of their youth. This generation’s culture has the most weight, which leans on and informs what has since been created. It amazes me that the pop music of the 1960s and 70s is just as popular as anything made now, but perhaps it’s partly because it simply dominates by way of subliminal volume. Hence the way 1970s nostalgia has managed to make itself so mainstream. If the dominant culture’s attention is on revisiting the past, that’s what’s happening to a lot of people. And a 68 year old Jean-Michel Jarre can release an album of retro electronica that has, at least to a lot of us, contemporary appeal. Swishy sounds, squelchy melodies, sequencer arpeggios that once lit up our evenings and now light them up all over again.

And good news for the nostalgic: for those who loved Mike Oldfield and remember Ommadawn from 1975 – the new year brings Ommadawn Revisited.